Photo credit: Antoine Saito

The celebrated Orchestre symphonique de Montréal returns to Washington Performing Arts at the dawn of a new era, as it welcomes the exciting Venezuelan-born conductor Rafael Payare as its ninth music director. A graduate of his home country’s renowned El Sistema, Payare has been hailed as “a prodigious artist who combines a rare gift of auditory perfection with a profound, delicate, intense, quivering sensitivity” (Le Monde, France).

Complementing this “new beginning” on the bill is a longtime favorite of Washington Performing Arts audiences, Yefim “Fima” Bronfman. The great Israeli-American pianist joins the OSM for Bartók’s technically imposing, ever-popular Piano Concerto No. 2—a work featured on Bronfman’s 1997 Grammy Award-winning recording of Bartók concerti. The OSM rounds out the program with Mahler’s monumental "Symphony No. 5" and with "Precipice", a compact and ethereal work commissioned by the OSM from contemporary American-born, Canadian-resident composer Dorothy Chang.